Need some diet tips. Tomorrow I want to start a healthy regimen. Any tips? I want to lose a little weight, but I'm willing to take it slow: I want to make serious diet changes for life. Any tips? thank you.

I disagree. You can cut calories all you want and lose weight. Anorexics are a prime example of that. It doesn't mean you are healthy. The human body requires Fats, Proteins, and Carbohydrates to maintain a healthy regimen. The debate is over how much of each and what your intake is versus what you are trying to achieve. If ultimately all you want is to lose weight and be able to run a mile then sure you can cut out the fats and proteins and eat fruits and vegetables. You will lose weight and yeh you you can run a mile every day to get the weight off faster, but are you really reaching optimal fitness? By that route you could cut out fruits and vegetables and eat just meat and fats and still lose weight. Heck I could lose weight if I just ate two candy bars a day. But what are the long term effects of those kind of diets?

The human body is designed for survival not minimal efforts to achieve weight loss. And it needs that variety of calories. There are numerous groups out there that will tell you to eat so much protein, so much carbohydrate, and so much fats per day. What it boils down to is studying and learning from those sources, finding an overall "best" approach to healthy living, and deciding what is best for you. However, I think you need to do some more reasearch into your nutrition regimen as you will likely find you have made a poor choice over the long term.

Personally, I'm working on a long term fitness regimen that allows me to be able to do anything at any time in any situation. I eat 5 oz of meat at each meal, two cups of different colored vegetables, and two snacks that consist of nuts and fruits daily. I've gone from 208 lbs to 180lbs (although Ive gained 14 with the current workout and adding milk to the diet). The difference is that I'm confident that I could handle myself in most any emergency or a situation that requires more than just running a mile.

I would suggest you take a slow approach. If you've been gaining weight for some time now (years) you cant just expect that you will lose it in a week or two. So forget about all those fast-magical-diets. They might work, but results are short term. Once youre off such diet you will gain all the weight right back. The trick is in moderation. First of all you need to find out how many calories you need per day. For that, use BMR calculator and add on top of that the amount of calories you burn off doing other things trough the day (exercising?). If you're not exercising than simple add ~20% more to your BMR value. To keep your body weigh stable you should eat at the rate of BMR + 20%. To lose weight you should eat at the rate of BMR.To gain weight (muscle) you should eat at BMR + 50%. Note that these are very rough estimates. I just wanted to point out that "the secret" to weight loss of weight gain is in daily calories. A simple maths: calories in (consumed) minus calories out (burned off) equals your weight loss / weight gain. If the result is a positive number you will gain weight, if result is a negative number you will lose weight. If result is around 0 than you will maintain you weight. Hope this helps.

Here is the surprising thing if you eat 2k cal of butter a day for a month you will lose weight faster than if you eat 2k cal popcorn simply because the way the 2 different foods impact your insulin level. I am not saying to eat 2k cal of butter :) but just trying to illustrate a point.

If you derive your daily foods from low glycemic index whole natural food you will see the best results.